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Attempt at a summary (a very good talk!): 1. Open source produces immense value and ironically locks itself out of capturing the value. In the last 20 years, op
by burakemir 4y ago
Attempt at a summary (a very good talk!):
1. Open source produces immense value and ironically locks itself out of capturing the value. In the last 20 years, open source has become the oxygen of software development. Cloud providers do what proprietary software vendors did 20 years ago.
2. "IP is free, support for $$" like Red hat is a viable business model but captures only a very small part of the overall value. The much larger part is captured by private sector selling SaaS, Cloud infra vendors. Software has become a commodity, it is user-facing services that capture value today.
3. The value capturing works fine for the companies but little to nothing of that value flows back to the people who write or maintain the software. This needs to be overcome. Openness is important but we need to value it, and governments as biggest buyers of services play a role. If we valued openness more consequently, it would lead to more opportunities for open source developers to capture value by offering user-facing services.
- imiric 4y agoI don't see any alternatives to open core there(?). Points 1 and 3 just mention the usual problems with OSS, not solutions. > "IP is free, support for $$" like Red hat is a viable business model but captures only a very small part of the overall value. The much larger part is captured by private sector selling SaaS, Cloud infra vendors. Isn't this the value captured by open core? Support is only part of premium services, while companies are free to choose any additional revenue stream (SaaS, extensions, integrations, etc.).
- burakemir 4y agoI also think that the talk can be seen as suggesting that open core is the preferable way to make a living from OSS - as long as openness is preserved (service implementations can be exchanged, client can pull out their data etc). My interpretation of why the talk was mentioned as an argument contra open core: - the talk does have criticism for value extraction that does not preserve openness (as the OP says: promises of interop etc are not kept, lock-in... is it really meaningfully "open"?), and that it is not necessarily sustainable or fair for OSS developers ("who pays the postgres committers"). This latter point certainly gets more nuanced for open core, but can still be relevant e.g. when you depend on some library you are interested in its being maintained, having security vulnerabilities identified and patched etc.